The building began in the 1310s as a cardinal’s livrée, one of the private palaces the curia’s princes built around the papal court. Benedict XII bought it in 1335 for the bishop of Avignon; when the see was raised to an archbishopric in 1475 it became the archbishop’s palace, and it was rebuilt late in the 15th century by Archbishop Giuliano della Rovere, who left Avignon to become Pope Julius II in 1503. It has held the museum since 1976.
The painting is the Campana collection: over 300 Italian panels assembled by the Marchese Giampietro Campana, bought by France in 1861 and deposited here from the Louvre. It runs continuously from 13th-century work still working in Byzantine conventions, through Sienese and Florentine trecento, to the quattrocento — Taddeo di Bartolo, Carpaccio, and Botticelli’s Virgin and Child. If you have walked round the palace wondering what the popes actually looked at, this is the answer, and it is one of the largest holdings of early Italian painting in France after the Louvre.
The part most visitors skip is the Avignon and Provençal sculpture at the start of the circuit, and it is the reason to come. Fourteenth-century Avignon was where the cardinals died, and their tombs were made by the best carvers in Europe. Two cases hold the surviving fragments of the tomb of Cardinal Jean de Lagrange, worked between 1388 and after his death in 1402, dismantled and rediscovered in the basement of the church of Saint-Martial in 1963. Its transi — the cardinal shown as a shrivelled, opened corpse rather than a sleeping prince — is the earliest known in France and one of the earliest anywhere. Everything grim in later medieval funerary art starts near here.
Practically: the permanent collection is free, always. It is open Tuesday to Sunday and closed on Mondays; from April to October it runs 10:00–18:00 daily except Monday, and in winter it does not open until 11:00 on weekdays. There are stairs and no full step-free route. It is fifty metres from the palace gate, so it is the obvious pairing — and, unusually, the cheaper visit is the better art.
